


Scientific Method

by queuebird



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Eames' Stupid Cupid Exchange, Fluff, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Oblivious Arthur (Inception), Post-Canon, Spreadsheets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-27 20:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17773874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queuebird/pseuds/queuebird
Summary: “Eames has a crush,” Ariadne says, eyes bright.Arthur looks at her, hands poised over his laptop keyboard. “What?”“Eames. He’s crushing on someonesupercute.” She leans in conspiratorially. “Onthis very team.” She kicks her feet up on the table holding the PASIV and looks well pleased.Arthur narrows his eyes. “...Who?”





	Scientific Method

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Estelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estelle/gifts).



> Part of the Eames Stupid Cupid 2019 fic exchange. For Estelle, who gave me the prompt “spreadsheets”--I hope you enjoy this silliness! I had a lot of fun writing it :^)
> 
> Much love to everyone who helped me generate ideas, including Dani, Andrea, June ([Silverofyou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverofyou)), and [Zigster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigster). I sort of mashed your ideas up and made this! Thanks to Zigster for betaing and being generally great!!!

“Eames has a crush,” Ariadne says, eyes bright. 

Arthur looks at her, hands poised over his laptop keyboard. “What?”

“Eames. He’s crushing on someone _super_ cute.” She leans in conspiratorially. “On _this very team._ ” She kicks her feet up on the table holding the PASIV and looks well pleased. 

Arthur narrows his eyes. “...Who?”

“I can’t tell you, obviously,” Ariadne says. “He trusted me with this information.”

“I don’t know why anyone trusts you with anything,” Arthur says dryly, turning back to his laptop.

“It’s my gentle feminine mystique.” Ariadne gives him a solemn nod.

Arthur huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Well. I don’t care, as long as his thing doesn’t jeopardize the job.” He types a sentence. “It’s not like we’re in high school anymore or something.”

“Of course,” Ariadne says.

The next day, Arthur doesn’t pay any more attention to Eames than he normally does. He doesn’t look up when Eames sweeps into the warehouse, greeting everyone in the traditional Eamesian way--with absolute ignorance of the concept of boundaries. It’s somehow gotten even worse since inception, as if they’re all best friends now for having gone through a near-limbo experience. Last time Arthur checked, Ariadne being a genius didn’t excuse Cobb and Yusuf from lying and endangering the lives of everyone else on the team.

“Hullo, Cobb. Yusuf.” Eames pats their shoulders friendly-like as he passes them by. “Ariadne, lovely as always.”

“Thank you, Eames.” She tilts her head, accepting a kiss on the cheek.

Arthur feels Eames come to a stop behind his chair, hovering over his shoulder like a muscly, malevolent British spirit.

“ _Arthur,_ darling,” Eames says. Arthur hunches over his computer and stabs at the keyboard. “Have you done something new to your hair? It’s _delicious._ ” He gives Arthur’s gelled helmet of a head a loving pat and moves on to his own desk, whistling.

By the time Arthur takes a break for lunch, Eames has worked his usual circuit around the room, flirting incessantly like he doesn’t have a job to do. When Eames leans close into Ariadne’s space, ostensibly to examine the labyrinthine structure of a massive bank, Arthur thinks about what Ariadne said the day before, then shakes his head and grabs his jacket and messenger bag as he leaves.

He runs into their client at the Chinese restaurant around the corner and subsequently spends the afternoon listening to him blather nervously about stock prospects, and _how is the job coming along, Arthur, I’ve found some more information on Mr. Zhu that may be of use to you. Have you visited Promontory Point? Let me take you...no, please, Arthur, it’s the least I could do._

The sun is low in the sky by the time they leave the restaurant for Burnham Park. Arthur admires the sunset over the Chicago skyline, then goes back to his hotel room and stays up too late organizing his newly-received information into his files.

When he arrives at the warehouse the next morning, there’s more of the same from Eames. He stalks around, flutters over Arthur’s shoulder, pestering him about disappearing yesterday. Has Eames always touched people this much? Arthur swears he’s never met anyone with Eames’s compulsive need to rub his hands over everything and everyone. _Like a toddler,_ Arthur thinks disdainfully.

Arthur starts counting. In his daily morning greeting, Eames touches Ariadne twice, Cobb once, and Yusuf one and a half times. He tends to touch Ariadne more, Arthur thinks, but they’ve also gotten close since the Hong Kong job. It’d be very Ariadne to brag about being crushed on. Eames flirts with Yusuf a lot, but that might be because Yusuf makes hilarious constipated faces when anyone gives him too much attention. With Cobb, Eames keeps his distance, but who wouldn’t? He does pull off a pretty spectacularly dirty innuendo when Cobb slaps him awake from a trial dream, but Cobb just squints at him and mumbles incomprehensibly about dream blocks.

Eames compliments Yusuf’s shirt, Cobb’s shoes, Ariadne’s scarf. He grabs lunch for Ariadne, gives Yusuf bedroom eyes, and laughs at Cobb’s terrible joke about horses.

When Arthur’s head starts spinning from everything he’s trying to keep track of, he breaks out the Moleskine.

...

“You’re missing someone,” Ariadne points out.

“Hmm?” Arthur is tabbing through all thirty-four of his open windows as fast as possible, trying to find the spreadsheet he’d put the mark’s weekly timetable on--he fucking _swears_ it was _right there_ next to the sixty-page PDF on the causes and consequences of the Great Recession--

Ariadne taps sharply on Arthur’s desk with her pencil.

“‘Ariadne, Yusuf, Cobb.’ Thanks for putting me first, by the way, makes me feel important.” She continues reading aloud. “‘Looks, smiles, laughs, touches--’”

Arthur jerks his head up and snatches his open Moleskine away from her. 

“ _What are you doing,_ ” he hisses, clutching it to his chest.

Ariadne leans her hip on his desk and raises her eyebrows. “Checking on your progress.”

“It’s going _fine._ You guys don’t need to hound me, I do know what I’m doing.”

“I mean,” and she nods significantly at the Moleskine. “ _This_ is really how you’re trying to figure out who he likes?”

Arthur feels his face heat up. “I’m _not--_ ” 

“And,” she continues, “you forgot yourself.” Her mouth tilts up. “You’re part of the team, too.”

Arthur seethes at Ariadne’s retreating back, then adds himself to the list.

…

In the following two days, Eames plants a full kiss on Cobb’s lips for doing something clever, objectifies Yusuf and his ass as they’re trying to stem the blood flow from the knife wound in his thigh, and wakes up from a dream with Ariadne, both of them giggling and flushed like schoolchildren. 

The numbers build up, but they’re apparently random. Arthur eventually switches from crude tallies in his Moleskine to the comforting gray cells of an Excel spreadsheet. He runs several statistical tests on the differences between the number of compliments given to Yusuf versus Cobb, the amount of flirting with Ariadne versus Yusuf, or the innuendos distributed to Ariadne versus Cobb, but the results always fall within the confidence interval.

Of course, Arthur is also part of the team, but he has trouble tracking his own numbers. Everyone knows the observer can’t observe himself in a study--it introduces a whole host of possible bias into the results. Arthur takes the scientific method very seriously.

Besides, it’s not like Eames has a crush on him.

...

“Darling, where’s Zhu going to be at, er, ten in the morning tomorrow?”

Arthur takes his pen out of his mouth. “Didn’t I send you his schedule yesterday? I thought I did.” He sticks the pen back in and traces his finger along 23rd Street on a map of 1926 New York City.

“Hmm, no. I remember everything I get from you, poppet.”

“Hold on, I’ll send it now,” he mumbles around his pen.

Eames smiles and blows him a kiss. 

…

There’s a blessedly Eames-free morning while he’s out chasing the mark and his fat chihuahua around Chicago. Arthur spends the time compiling summaries of crush numbers for each day since he’s started data collection. He tries a variety of graphical representations to compare his numbers and decides that the horizontal grouped bar graphs fit his aesthetic the best. Then he goes under so Yusuf can test the stability of his latest batch.

He’s all ready to add a new day of data to his graphs so he can achieve a rainbow of bars, but when Eames returns in the afternoon bearing lunch for himself and Arthur, the numbers stall. Instead of dropping off the food and going off to bother Ariadne or literally anyone else, Eames lingers in Arthur’s space like Beijing smog and pesters him like his mother, if his mother was a gross asshole.

“Arthur.” Eames rolls his chair next to Arthur, where he’s scribbling around the photos taped to the blackboard. “Your arse is, as always, breathtaking.”

Arthur looks at him with exasperation. He neglects to dignify that with an answer, and instead turns away and stains the edges of his files with quesadilla grease.

Eames tries again. “Arthur, did I mention how absolutely ravishing you look today? I could eat you up.” He leans towards Arthur for a moment. Arthur realizes Eames is trying to smell him, seizes a fistful of pencils, and goes over to Ariadne’s trash can with his pencil sharpener. 

“Eames is an asshole,” Arthur tells Ariadne. Eames pouts at him from across the room. 

Ariadne nods. “But that’s nothing new,” she says.

“A creepy, gross asshole.” Arthur breaks the tip of a Mickey Mouse pencil.

After a moment, Ariadne sighs. “Arthur, have you been tracking your own numbers?”

“No,” Arthur says. “Why?”

…

Eames has pulled his chair next to Arthur’s desk, close enough for their thighs to touch. Arthur’s poring over the job briefing that Eames has marked up in fat black pen.

“I’d love to kiss you,” Eames says.

Arthur hums.

“I’d love to run my hands up your sweet little thighs and suck bruises in the skin underneath your jaw, where it looks so soft.”

“Hmmm.” Arthur leans closer to the folder open on his lap. Behind Eames, Yusuf is making a constipated face. “Eames, I don’t understand what you’ve written here.” Arthur taps at Eames’s scrawl in the margin of the document. “‘Distraction--Arthur’?” He finally spares Eames a glance. “I’m going to be in the vault with Cobb. You and Yusuf and Ariadne are supposed to be the distractions. Right?”

Eames smiles faintly. “Just a personal note. My apologies.”

…

“So,” Ariadne says as they round the corner of the quaint coffee shop adjacent to her bank, buildings emerging from the ground around them, “how are your Eames numbers?” 

“Should I be concerned about your work ethic?” Arthur says, squinting up at the sun.

“It’s fine. This job’s easy.” Ariadne waves a dismissive hand. The projections eye her. “There are more important matters at hand.”

“Like Eames’s love life?”

“Exactly.” She kicks a rock down the sidewalk. “I don’t know what he’s supposed to do with it, though.”

“His love life? Yeah, me neither.”

“No, your,” Ariadne makes a vague gesture, “little tables and graphs.”

Arthur politely blinks at her.

“Well, you sent it to him, didn’t you?” she says, cutting a glance at him. “On Zhu’s schedule?”

“Ohhh, shit. Yeah.” Arthur scrunches up his forehead. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“‘The best in the business,’” Ariadne mimics under her breath.

…

Topside, Arthur starts to feel itchy and self-conscious around Eames. He didn’t really think Eames, with all his single-mindedness and obnoxious obstinacy, would see or care that there was an extra sheet in the Excel document labeled “E,” next to “Weekdays,” “Weekends,” and “Future.” When did Eames notice it? He hasn’t been acting any differently. Maybe Ariadne was just messing with Arthur. 

It’s not a big deal. It’s not weird to be curious about your coworkers’ interests, Arthur insists. Especially if it might impact the job. Arthur has to be prepared for everything--a projection of Eames’s crush coming in and disrupting things, for example. His uncontrollable lust could manifest in any number of dangerous ways. Who knows what might happen? It’s a good thing Eames has Arthur, really.

He doesn’t realize he’s been glaring daggers into his spreadsheet and its neat little rainbow graphs until Eames mooches over, hands in his pockets, and leans in curiously. 

“Proper scientist, hmm?” He grins, sharkish.

Arthur turns his glare to Eames. 

“Have you figured it out yet?” Eames says.

Arthur looks at his computer, sighs, and waggles the mouse over his data pensively. “I mean--to be honest, no. My best guess is Ariadne, I suppose, but Yusuf is a close--”

He stops when Eames cups his face and kisses him.

“How about now?” Eames says, close enough to Arthur’s face that his eyes cross.

“Uh,” Arthur says.

Eames kisses him again. And again. They don’t talk for a while after that.

...

No one looks up when Eames breezes into the warehouse the next morning, makes a beeline for Arthur, and proceeds to snog his face off. No one says anything when they take twice as long as usual to get lunch, or that when they return, Arthur’s hair is curling out of its gel, and Eames’s shirt buttons are done up wrong.

But Ariadne does look a bit proud, and when Arthur checks his spreadsheet later, all his data is gone. It’s been replaced with a single word:

_Darling._

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://queuebird.tumblr.com)


End file.
